I’m Down With Ascension

I think that what bothers me most is the sense of mythos that encircles the issue of a term that once was used to describe what happened to Jesus and has been applied in more and more New Age spiritual circles.  Ascension.  I think that there is nothing that gets you further from understanding ascension than ascension as it is handled and talked about in the world today.

What bothers me isn’t that ascension exists, its that it has served as a kind of be-all for all things…. kind of stop and shop spiritually.  Its as though the concept of the rapture along with awakening and maybe even a shark attack are all put together to create one big happy whirlwind of an experience and in the process it is creating something that simply boggles the mind!

If some are to be believed, we will get new bodies.  We wont feel pain.  We will be “upgraded” and “downloaded.”  There are grids and they are changing.  The sunspots regulate all of this and there are galactic brothers and sisters ready to help.  Ascension is hard work, certainly, but I don’t think anyone really knows what the heck is going on with it because if the stories are true, everyone is talking about it but no one is actually experiencing it.  Oh, no, that isn’t true; people ARE having all sorts of perceptual and energetic phenomenon taking place all OVER the place, but just no one has popped out of their bodies and been given an immortal blue-skinned body or something like that.  Or flipped into the 5th dimension.  I rather think that your awareness simply broadens.  I hate to be the kill joy who tells how the movie ends, but all signs point to this.  Greater awareness.

I know I am being mean.  I am at the very least being very bratty, and I KNOW that this puts people off. See, I want you in the “off” position just long enough so I can see if I can reset you.  I think those interested in ascension are in dire need of it.  First off, the idea of something coming down the pike takes your eyes OFF the pike.  Keep your eyes in front of you and soak up the MOMENT.  This is important.  Now, the other thing is to consider anything a possibility, but regard the past as an indication of what will most likely happen.  TO keep things in perspective, most of the ascension stuff happening is just awakening, and awakening is a subtle change in the body and its neurophysiology which allows for you to experience energy and process information slightly differently. These very small changes (which I don’t even know will show up on a blood panel that your doctor might do) translate into big changes for you and your way of life.  That is very cool, but it does not mean that you are getting a new body anytime soon. The great secret is that the one you already have is designed to do some AMAZING stuff and you really need to stick around to see what is NEXT.  The problem with all of this upgrade stuff is that it also turns attention away from what is really happening and keeps people stuck in their awakening process.

Yes, there are a LOT of people waking up now.  This is good, a god-send if you ask me.  A silent revolution.  However, no blue bodies yet, no new immortal skins.  This does not mean everyone will wake up.  Maybe just a few more.  Maybe everyone. Maybe thirty more.  Or a thousand.  I don’t know.  However, what I do know is that this is a time unlike any other and we should keep our eyes on the pike and watch what emerges.

There is a lot that COULD happen, but what DOES happen could be different from what COULD.  Still, I think its important to dream big but realize its all just a dream. Plant that seed, absolutely.  Let the Collective Consciousness know your vote. If enough people make the same vote, it usually tends to get passed into a kind of collective law.  Me, I am voting for x-ray vision, ability to fly and the breathe water.  If enough wish for it, I know it is going to happen. I know I sound snarky, but I am also quite serious.

I think that what this experience does is it breaks down the barriers  that you have cognitively but it can also lead to a sense as though one can and is everything.  And you would be right. You are.  However, you are also in a body as well, and that accounts for something.  That body does not suddenly change the rules of how reality works when you awaken, you simply begin to have a broader range of experiences.  I can say that I for one go Waaaaaay the heck out in the consciousness department.  I do this because I like it. I like to feel how my consciousness seems to turn inside out.  I do.  But it does not mean that I am ascending on out of this place.  I have had all sorts of unusual things happen to me from being bathed in a golden fluid that was all over my hands and arms and face and that someone eludes to as being something that is connected to the Buddha.  I have had my dreams invade my waking reality in ways that are almost bizarre and I don’t talk about it much because someone might cart me off, but in the beginning I could actually dream while awake and while doing that I saw all kinds of weird off-world phenomenon and beings.  But I still remained with my body.  My awareness, dear reader, is what has changed.  Not my body.  I might download, upload and vector shift, but this precious bod I have, remains. I have ascended but remained with my feet firmly on the ground. However, I REFUSE to call it Ascension. I’m down with it, yes, but unfortunately the term has become polluted with so much misinformation so as to somehow seed those who but into it or use the term as seemingly a little….well….kooky.  Do you want to look kooky?  Okay, but just remember that there are a lot of people who use this term apparently who have some pretty wild and far ranging ideas as to what it actually means or could mean. SOme of it means living off-world in new bodies.  THAT would be so totally cool, but you know, I have a feeling that i am going to keep my body because I think it would be a more interesting challenge to see what millions of years of engineering by nature has to offer.  I am talking about how nature contains the keys to heaven. We just need to learn how to unlock them.  So call me snarky if you must, and I promise not to revisit this subject again, but really, it isn’t like the world hangs on my ever word.  It feels more like an intimate dinner party with a snarky host. SO what do YOU think, hummm?

Let me be real and honest with you.  I know that I am being a little  flip, but to be serious, I am divesting myself of a lot of old garbage. I am very very happy about that.  It is the culmination of a very long dream of mine.  Its been what this journey through lifetimes has been all about.  I have been slave and king, knight and thief, mother father, brother, sister, and lover.  I have seen life through the eyes of horses and stags and hawks.  I have been through the transmigration and lived to tell the tale.  All of this, every step, has somehow been incredibly important if only to give form to the great void that births us all and to which we return to be recycled and made new.  We CAN be anything we wish or choose to be, and most likely we are in some far flung galaxy somewhere.  I know I was at one point in time…..but the thing is, I am here now and I am here to bring heaven in to this chamber of the heart and light body so as to fulfill an ancient prophecy having to do with bearing the kingdom to earth.  And that, my dear ones, is enough for all lifetimes.  I have my vision and I am seeking it.  It has to do with bringing light into the earth.

How about we do this; suspend what it is all of this is going to be and focus on what it is right now.  Then, we can dream big but remain rooted in NOW.  Then, by looking at those who have also awakened and what their experience is and has been, we might actually get a better idea what this is all about.  Thing is, we also have a many-thousand year tradition that has written down all sorts of info about this process.  Its as old as the human race!  Could it be that we have stumbled on a kind of puberty process where we unfold just a little more in these earthly bodies so we can wake the infinite?   Look, I think incredible things will happen, but I also know that we are bearing the profound to the mundane in order to enliven it.  Isn’t that what creation is all about?  Let’s shake these earthly bodies up a bit and make things more interesting in the process. Releasing what you thought you knew you were is an important first step, but where that leads, who knows….I’d ask why limit yourself?  That way, if you get the blue immortal body you can ring me up and we can have a good laugh at how insanely provincial I have been and I will write you a special post bidding you fair morrows and all that lovely rot!

So what do you say?  Would seeking to care for what is in front of you seem to be the most important thing right about now?  The world is in a heap of trouble and your enlarged perspective is greatly needed!  Maybe its time to get to work and straighten out the things that give your the most trouble in your own life so that you can become that fascinating vessel for the light that is set to flood in from wherever its coming from (like from inside of you perhaps).  Come on, what do we have to lose except the old worn out conceptualizations?  What might we do a little differently with these upgraded vector bodies? Ah, what indeed!

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The Healing Way

I have been going to have reiki treatments recently to assist with some clearing in my chakras, and my energy field in general.  There is a lot of talk about chakra clearing and chakra meditation.  It is useful to know, though, that your whole body is a vast network of criss-crossing energy lines that go all the way down to the atomic level.  If you were to see your energy field, you would look like a densely packed fibrous body of light, with branches that are big, like arteries, but also with a very fine system like capillaries.  Where energy draws towards the trunk of the body, there are vortices of energy that are called chakras.  There are many many more than the seven we normally talk about, but that is mostly because people aren’t as aware of them, but they are there nonetheless.

All throughout this body of light, energy flows. It seems that anything that we do not experience fully and acknowledge completely emotionally winds up getting lodged in the same way that a splinter or scar exists in the body.  When I began this process of awakening almost seven years ago, I knew next to nothing about Chinese medicine and when I hear that the light body stores old memory, I thought that was a little funny. Didn’t the brain do that?  I am sorry to say that up until that time, I had been seeing auras and reading energy for years.  I had been seeing how the aura, which is in the body, would show or exhibit emotional states all over the body and I certainly learned to read this energy. It wasn’t until I awoke that I became aware of the phenomenon of releasing blocks.  These blocks are merely unprocessed emotion that gets lodged in the energy body.  Once you are able to go down deep into the very block, you can release it. There are a number of methods I was shown how to use by none other than the intelligent energy that has been living in my bod all these years.

Having the reiki reminds me again how these blocks contain memory in them.  Last week I was able to go back into the first year or less of my life.  This was pretty amazing given that I have no memories of my first year of life.  Its just a haze to me.  However, whenever I dig up a block and release it, its almost like uncorking some ancient emotion that I feel again perhaps for the first time.  I was speaking to a friend today while taking a break between teaching my classes at the university how I had encountered this last block and how I had actually KNOWN that the problem that the block was existed all these years but somehow in my own physiology and energy field, I seemed to need to experience the actual  feeling directly instead of having a version of it resting in my awareness.

Isn’t that kind of weird?  To me, it actually feels like the block is a living being, locked in ice and waiting to be let go like some Mastadon whose organs are preserved and all that is needed is a careful electrical jolt to get the creature up and moving again. In a real way, though, this was what this last release was all about.  I KNEW that I hadn’t grieved my father’s passing as an infant.  Of course.  That is obvious, right?  And yet, deep inside the block there was this very specific feeling or awareness that lived in the pit of it.  When I felt THAT, I encountered a week-long process of grieving ina powerful way.  Call it speed grieving if you wish, because that is just what it felt like. Long since dead, I had to get on with it and not stand on ceremony. I was raw for about five days and slowly began to feel more healed from the ordeal.

So I know that I am not any different from the rest of you.  I know that others who have gone through the release process have also described allowing themselves to really FEEL the blocked energy as a way to help move the energy. This works, but it assumes you know how to access the energy.  Its not always possible.  There are other ways to access these blocks, and each is about as useful as any other.

WHile feeling deep into the block is one way, another way is to remain aloof, to allow the Observer part of you to come to the fore.  This Observer is actually very detached and it may help you to allow yourself to feel the same sense of detachment that comes with the Observer,  By allowing yourself to watch everything as though it is just a play, you can watch and see, but not become emotionally enmeshed in what is happening in front of you. Being able to step back like this is useful because it allows the focus of awareness to be present in the healing process, and while it may seem crazy, I have observed that it is observation or awareness being brought into the moment that serves to heal these blocks. Interestingly, the folks doing the reiki on me were saying the same thing.  I never learned this concept in any book, I was taught it by kundalini itself. It showed me years ago that my job was to SEE the block.  Just SEE itl in time, the block will go away.  If you can imagine that just behind your eyes is an infinite consciousness using your eyes to see through you, you can actually begin to allow more of the infinite through because…..that is exactly what is happening!  The method used to dissolve blocks is not to think it but FEEL it.  Thinking it or rationalizing is a very limited activity and is good for solving small problems like how to fix the kitchen sink but is really horrible at being able to divine the core of an issue that might stretch back lifetimes for you. It is the feeling self that must be enlisted for this.  I know; curious that I was just speaking of being aloof. Think of it as using your eyesight to SEE a problem but not get enmeshed in it.

There is another method for releasing blocks and this is movement.  Movement itself can be divided into several different classes.  One is shaking. Shaking has been shown to help release trauma stored in the body. It was first observed in animals that had been attacked by large prey animals.  Turns out, humans also use this method without realizing it when releasing old trauma sometimes. The other form of movement is the kind of movement found in the eastern traditions of Chi Gung and Tai Qi.  Both methods are designed to help move energy and eliminate blocks. Both are gentle workouts for the body and have been shown to bring a variety of health benefits. For anyone dealing with a backlog of blocks or who is aware of the blocks more than the average person, I would suggest keeping with a form of movement like Qi Gung and staying with it for at least a month with one or two session per week.  This is because some clearings take time to happen as well as once clearing does happen, you can sometimes get more clearings as a result of one clearing. Everything affects everything else.

There are a lot of very good visualizations to try when releasing blocks.  One is to stare into the block and feel your gaze breaking it up.  Another is to imagine a large hand opening up instead of clenching. Another is to imagine a river that is flowing and carrying you with it.  You do not control anything, you let the river take you.  Yet another very good visualization is imagining that your body is like a conduit or straw and energy flows through you unimpeded.  You let go of trying to be in control but become more of an observer.  By doing this kind of work, you can begin to shift your focus so that you can help to facilitate the movement of energetic blocks in your system.

Image © Stafford Artglass, Parker Stafford

By studying and knowing the chakra system you can learn more about how to dissolve a block.  If energy is stuck in one center, say, the heart, you can meditate on what the heart does and how the heart might be blocked and how to release it. For example, when dealing with root issues, like I have, I have found that I have been feeling emotional energy surrounding things like survival, nurture, and even abundance and sexuality. I can begin to get a clue about why the material is blocked, but knowing the basics of the center wont always lead me to the block, I have to allow myself to just FEEL it.  Somewhere inside of you, you do know the content of every single block in your body, but we do a lot to filter all of that out from conscious awareness. That is why meditation can be so handy. It can help to bring back into focus those things more on the edge of your awareness.  It is known, for example, that the left hemisphere acts as a giant filtering agent and that by letting down our “guard” so to speak, we can begin to broaden our awareness and filter less.  When you filter less, you also feel a flow of energy.  You don’t necessarily have to focus on everything that moves by, but being in a place where you can observe is very helpful as I am sure you can imagine.  Its different, but a very good kind of different and is within your own abilities to try.

The advantage of clearing is that you can better feel and hear the flow of the universe in you. If you want to know cosmic consciousness, this is a good way to do it; by reducing the noise!  It allows you to feel more clearly and it also helps to erase karma.  Being able to reduce karma in your life is huge.  By releasing blocks you are releasing also the vibration that the energy that has exerted all this time.  You will find, bit by bit, that you will attract based more on what you feel you want and need instead of constantly getting stuck on a karmic merry-go-round with different faces and names but the same behaviors popping up over and over and over.  It isn’t the world that needs to change, it is merely conforming to what you are.  It is you that must change if you with to attract a different kind of world in your experience.  The really great thing is that you can!

 

Sacred Soul, Sacred Sex

Part 1

There is no doubt that awakening fundamentally changes you.  Its easy I think to forget how it changes you, how it changes how you relate to the world in a slew of ways.  All of these ways, though, seem to my mind tied directly to a central awareness of how everything is part of everything else and that nothing happens that is by accident.  Out of this emerges what we might want to call fate, because for me fate is itself an accumulation of our own choices made that define our character.  In truth there is absolutely nothing hard and fast about fate except where we as humans solidify into a certain predictable series of beliefs and behaviors. The lesson to us, then, is you can not only change the person and their beliefs and behaviors, but you can also change the world AROUND them by changing those beliefs and behaviors while at the same time, altering this thing we call fate.

There is no fate save what we choose.  This is so huge to the Source of All Life that the Source does not tamper with freewill one iota.  With great freedom comes great responsibility;  the responsibility is yours for how your life is.  When you think you were MEANT to do something, say, to get a job or end up in a house in the country or meeting the people you have, you have to look deeper at the root causes for these events.  If you do not, you will believe quite certainly that fate is guiding you and that you really have no control. I see that the “hidden hand” in all of this is….me: my choices made over a long period of time.  It’s funny because very often people want to see this as the universe or God or fate.

How often do we take our “solidified behavior” (the behavior which is recursive, unexamined, perhaps even unseen in the moment) and allow them to turn into events that feel now like an iron wall.  No wonder people feel like they are powerless to change their lives.  The events in their lives DO feel immovable and solid.  And so, as a result, they just go along with the wave of walls as they move like some solid turnstile. Awakening can in some instances give you a peek behind the curtain.  It has for me.  I wont say I am perfect, I am not, but I am a very curious creature and do not give up easily.  When others have given up on a hard nut, I am there figuring out how to crack it.  Persistence is the single feature to success, I have found…..not intelligence, nor genius, nor even creativity or kindness.  Persistence alone wins the day, and I tend to keep at it. How do we change our patterns? How do we break down the iron wall which is in truth just the accumulation of our unseen or unacknowledged behavior over years (and even lifetimes).  It is daunting, but it is a mountain that can me moved (and often piece by piece and over time).

In the Gnostic texts, Jesus spoke to his disciple Thomas about how when one awakens to the Kingdom that the unknown things are revealed.  Certainly this happens if you make yourself available to it.  Studying these books it became clear to me that the “two” that birthed the Christ was none other than the two hemispheres of the brain.  I know this isn’t exciting or sexy or flashy, but the mechanism that brings this flash of revivification is, I contend, the merging and alignment of not just the two hemispheres of the brain, but a new alignment within the entire nervous system that connects waking awareness to a cellular awareness that goes deep within the body and is part of why awakening can feel so “deep” to us. This alignment effectively awakens a much larger part of the mind, which goes into the body and the wisdom that it contains. We become like biological antenna’s, soaking up the signals that suddenly we can now feel because of the activation of this larger sensory system.  Part of entering into this state initially, I have discovered, is allowing your right brain function to be given freer rein.  By doing this, we unlock our potential as human beings because the linear processor that is the left brain cannot grasp the bigger picture issues that emerge through the right brain processing which alone has the capacity to grasp the infinite.

So here we go, the juicy bits.

When I awoke, I was unzipped by the universe.  I was made to be naked, stripped bare of all that I held dear.  Cherished, the mere glance of the divine upon me changed me.  This glance of the divine was itself the glance of awareness that WE ourselves cast into ourselves. The divine was not outside of me, but awoke within me.  There was now no fooling myself, no running (okay, I tried a number of times in the beginning).  We do this because there is not a being that comes to us to deliver awakening.  We deliver it to OURSELVES.  By opening ourselves up, the infinite fills us.  This energy is of a kind that feels like it could make rocks rise up and dance.  It is such a vibrant and alive energy.  It can also drive some people crazy who are not ready for it.  I certainly resisted it without realizing what it was I was doing; I had been resisting it my whole life without fully realizing it.  These things become like reflexive things. It can be hard to know what this “resistance” is that I am talking about if you haven’t felt it or wrestled with it.  It is so deep within, so constant a “fight” that most don’t even recognize that it is even happening.

By awakening, we can learn how to relax and realize that we are each designed to be channels for this energy, that this war within is over, that resistance has been part of the problem.  We have resisted having the whole of our being uncovered by this inner interrogator that wakes up when we wake up.  “Just let it flow,” it would say to me. “What is it going to do to me?” would be my question with a short and cryptic reply, “….Make you feel better…”

I was like Nemo’s dad Marlin in the Pixar movie where he is sitting at the back of the throat of the whale and he is having to let go.  He asks Dori how she knows if the whale isn’t going to eat them.  She replies that she doesn’t know, she just knows its time to let go and so she does.  The reward comes as they are shot out of the blowhole of the whale only to realize that all this time they had been carried safely to their destination.  Sometimes you need to learn how to TRUST.  If you believe that the world is there just to trip you up, you are going to create all kinds of events where this happens.  The world is as you are, so be careful.  When I awoke, I was shown that what remained as beliefs about how things that formed the basis of my karma and this karma was this iron wall of belief I spoke of earlier.  In letting go, which awakening CAN help you to do, you learn the art of embracing the bliss that is both you and the universe. I find embracing bliss is what happens when I let go.  I can’t hold onto bliss very well while I am still holding onto some baggage or other (although sometimes I do still try in a reflexive way).

By waking up, my energy body was unzipped.  Sexual energy moved upwards into the higher vibrations.  I realized that what we take to be sexual energy is merely one vibrational frequency of an entire octave of vibrations. Sexual energy while treated with so much shame and guilt here on earth became a holy garden when my energy body was opened up to its larger implications and reality.

This energy would “rise” through each energy center and at each place the energy center would experience or hold a given vibration.  All the while, it was as though water was rising up through a hose through my core.  It was always JUST water but at each station or chakra the water was vibrated differently.  It was like white light, always just white light, but which can be split into a rainbow with a prism.

When the water (life force) rose into the sacral, there was a slight change in how the energy felt. It was more sensual, less sexual.  It would continue to rise and rise and rise as the energy went through what felt was a transformation while moving through each chakra.  This energy penetrated into and opened each chakra in the same way that a lover would move through his beloved.  The difference was that now, we were not limited to a physical body’s physiology’ bliss now moved upwards in an orgasmic stream throughout my entire body.  It dives (or emanates?) into every single cell, into every atom of my body.  This pearlescent force churned and turned as it made stones dance, the dead now alive.  What was alive was now more alive than it had ever been before.  What was sexual went beyond mere sexuality into what I knew was the basis for sacred sex, and into a realm of inspiration and then the pure light of bliss from whence the Hindu’s say, we do not return (except we do return, over and over, lifetimes worth in order to perfect ourselves).

I soon came to realize that Tantra wasn’t about sex at all.

Tantra was about how we unzip ourselves energetically and allow the universal force of bliss, which is orgasmic, to move through us.  Tantra is about becoming a vessel, whether male or female, for the divine. But that makes it sound like the divine comes into us.  It doesn’t.  It occurs to us.  We each have this lineage in us all.  No one is above another, no one better than the other, the great beauty and truth that could change our world if we just let more of that awareness to soak into us. This, some call the “rainbow body” which becomes a vehicle for reaching states of spiritual ecstasy.  This is where pleasure beyond any known by any method exists.  It is a great uncompounded love, which is undivided and contains all of the other types of love within itself (philio, agape, eros). Like separate streams in our world here (and in our experience) are in the cosmic, drawn together to show that love is love, all forms of it.  The cosmic does not divide itself the way we do in our own minds it seems to me.  It seems that our uneasiness about all the forms of love existing at once and together upsets our cultural apple carts.  In the cosmic mind, these distinctions not only fall away, they are irrelevant (or so it seems).

Part II

And so it was that when I awoke, I awoke to being aware of another near me, inside of my energy body as though she were my own self.  How she got there was a mystery to me but I felt her as though she had slipped out of her body and into mine.  I would later learn that what was happening was that on an energetic level she was sharing the same space as me just as I was sharing the same space as she.  By living in her own energy space, my own energy was interacting with hers.  Unzipped, both awakened by this thing that happened, it was as though we entered into a Tantric embrace.  Masculine energy interacted with feminine energy: one unlocked the other and unlocked, the other did something transcendent to the first and this went on as the energy appeared to refine itself within ourselves, driving it higher and higher until someone crumpled under its intensity.  The dance of opposites began.  I wondered what on earth had happened.  It turned out that the person who was inside my energy field was someone from another country away.  Later I learned about the concept of twin souls and twin rays.  Everything they were saying described the phenomenon I was experiencing to a “T.”  I figured that this was what this was all about; I had a twin soul. For a while this idea stuck, but increasingly the story of twins fell apart for me.  It did not hold up…..but I wasn’t entirely sure WHY.  It turns out that the energy that makes twins feel like twins is actually karma.  It feels like fate, right?  What we do not know as humans on this planet yet is that we can change even the most ironclad walls.  We are here to liberate ourselves from the prison of karma.  Doing this means becoming AWARE of who we are, what we are, and what karma is. I found that sometimes karma will create these powerful connections but there is another less fractious form of connection that is less difficult in the end.  When I traced the energy that I felt in these connections to their source I had to admit that while it made the energy “intense” the energy was being created from some unresolved feelings from the past.

The next layer for some has been that its not that we have twins, but that we have soul connections.  This frees us up to begin to see that we have these karmic connections to people and that we will remain connected until we clear up the karma.    Whether good or not, I have found that I have been able to feel others in the same way I first felt my “twin” from seven years ago simply based on how karmas are the same.  The lesson here, folks, is that you can become glued to someone you do not know and might not even get along with simply based on some glitch that you have with the universe.  What is more, you can also wind up like I was, creating more and more of these connections with each and every one of them all the same!  I can tell you with absolute certainty that karma is a merry go round.  The names change, but all of the underlying principles remain the same. This energy, which causes stones to dance is powerful enough to put into motion all of your unresolved feelings in full three-dimensional color and motion right before your eyes. All the while, it will confer on you the capacity to reach depths within the beloved that he or she may not have even known existed but that open up simply because you are now awake, unzipped, and living with the universal consciousness moving through you.

We take the bliss to mean that we are in love with this person.  It isn’t that we don’t, it is that by loving these people we are also engaging with people who still have karma to undo.  Because of this, it is only a matter of time that these karmic threads wind up being tested and trouble arises.  And in awakening trouble WILL arise for the simple fact that YOUR SOUL has chosen THIS.  By so choosing this, it will beseech the universe silently and subconcsciously, for it seems the universe will bring it tests for this karma until the karma is cleared.  What this means is that events will just have a way of happening where certain karmic issues are tested over and over.  They just will.  Life will become a valuable teacher or it can become a burden to you.  Its really up to you.  But the intense sensuality and sexuality that is felt in awakening is your own soul waking up.  Our energy is churned when we encounter another person who has something that vibrates in sympathy with us.  That’s it.  Simple as that.  Now I  ask you; would you prefer to attract based on clear karma or karma based in loss and lack?  You might feel the sacred fire of Tantra flowing through you since you are awake, but it will also mean that you will also run into problems having to do with the karma being tested, which is that you will experience lack.  YOU will experience it.  But unless you take responsibility for your newfound awareness, you will go about this blindly.  You will behave like a victim.  You will forget or ignore that all of this is co-creative.  You will act like a spoiled child who expects everything to be handed to them.  No; you create ALL of this.  The freedom you were given AS A SOUL by the creator meant that you have great responsibility also.  Being a victim, then, is just so much silliness when you realize who you are and that ALL of this, ALL of it was created by you.  I know this is hard for some to take, but you will not clear up your own karma until you take full responsibility for having created it.  You may not have made someone hurt you, but you most certainly attracted a person into your life that would do nothing else except hurt you.  When you realize what the mechanisms are at work here, things become incredibly plain and what was once whining becomes quiet realization.

The fire of the soul connection is what happens when we awaken sometimes.  It does not happen to all, but we are each different.  But for those that is does happen to, it serves to highlight the power of the energy that is awakening.  We mistake the connection for what it is which is the power of our own awakened state.  When we can learn to love ourselves enough to undo the world, what some called “overcoming the world,” we can each reach a place where we are free to write a new story as conscious creators instead of knee jerk reactionaries in a world that makes little sense to us.  Now we carry this sacred fire and when we love, we love deeply.  Our energy moves like deep energetic riptides through the light body of the beloved whether she is near or far.  Energy, no composed of any mass, is not constrained the way objects with mass are.  It can be there now.  It does not even travel.  It can be in multiple places at once.  It is a time traveler.  It can know things before they happen.  This is the basis, you see, for so many of these uncanny abilities that people who awaken wind up having.  We are unzipped.  We are now no longer limited to mere object-based reality.  We no longer love based on a physical body but an entire energy body that becomes like so many locks and keys.  And so, the dance of tantra is where a woman’s love moves all through her, unlocking her cell by cell, atom by atom, chakra by chakra as their energy invigorates each other, as he unlocks her and she unlocks him.  They duck and turn and spin in an endless cycle of sacred love, of energy that is more than just here and now.  But it is not fated save for what you are unable to undo or heal or realize.

The problem I have observed both in myself and in others is that karma makes you blind.  Karma is itself based in blindness to the divine. Not many people realize that you can entirely erase and reverse karma by undoing the thing that blinds you. This blindness is as simple as believing that you are not, say, lovable, that the universe or God wont really look out for you.  The secret is that it does, but the deal was that we learn to be responsible for our beliefs and feelings and actions as part of our being gifted with both individuality and also freewill (I bet you can’t imagine freewill without individuality or vica versa can you?—Not in any sane way, I bet). In order  for love to mean anything, especially divine love, we had, as a race, to learn how to avail ourselves of it (it is everywhere, literally all around us).  That means that if we believed we were not lovable, it could become or seem to be a reality because by feeling it, we would manifest all the people and events that would conform to that belief or feeling deep inside of us.  The task of undoing karma is in reaching down and undoing the knots of emotion inside of ourselves as we related to the divine (this is not outside of us).  To know your true divine nature you must undo these knots in the same way that you undo the laces on a pair of boots.  You loosen them and then you can take off those tight restrictive boots. You then never wear them again…

The magic of the soul connection or the twin soul, I have learned, is really the magic of our own souls.  We are children who are now stepping up into a new layer or level of experience.  We are signaling we are ready for this new experience, but to continue to move through it, we need, I feel, to finish up “overcoming the world” so that we do not drag the karma from the past into our present which now has the capacity to be free perhaps for the first time in lifetimes. When I say “new experience” it is new to us, but this is as old as the universe.  This is the same force or phenomenon as what we know at the atomic level as “entanglement.”  Now, what can we learn from it?

The Great Tuning Fork

When I was younger and I began seeing auras, it made me realize in a very tangible way that we are all energy; our bodies, composed of this seemingly coarse matter was energy vibrating at a  certain frequency.  Different types of matter has different densities.  Different things have a different vibration, such as light and sound; all vibration.  We live in a sea of All Energy. All kinds of energy moving at different frequencies, and yet, there is this sense that I have and that many others seem to have, too, which is that “behind” all of this or resting “within” all of this energy is a core energy source or force.  We have all kinds of names, and for years and years every name I heard seemed to fall short of really explaining it.  What I realize is that any name IS going to fall short of the grandeur of this living presence in all things.  So anything will seem mundane or silly almost.  Bearded man up in the clouds?  Silly!  Buxom Lady, Mother to all living in the springs and oceans?  Silly!  And yet, even as we say that we can dream such images into being and experience them as virtually as any vivid dream or vision.  This is so because everything is a creation, everything IS creative energy.  It isn’t nothing means anything, it means that anything can mean anything you need or want.  Understand how this deeper level creativity works and you can find yourself living a much less effortful life.  (yes-I just made that word up…) The Gods and Goddesses are reflections of what we are able to realize or know. Its a little funny that for some a God has meant a beaded guy up in the clouds.  It shows that we have pretty well excluded the feminine in ourselves and in our deity.  Well, all of that is changing. A delicate vibration of bliss is coming back to us as we reach the End Times.  Set your hair on fire chillens, cause the seals are about to be undone.  Seven of them; right along with the seven chakras making up the pranamayakosha or light body.  The End Times means that we are coming to the end of the old way and we are now seeing the New Way.  And I am here to tell you that.  Didn’t you know?   That, and the fact that by being energy we all have our effect on the world around us….and that the core of all things can have its own effect on YOU?  Well  sit back and let me tell you a story……

This great presence in all things I will boldly say is like a tuning fork.  Its vibration is so pure, so incredibly refined…..it is like observing a master at work.  I understand how those who can pause to see the incredible masterwork that exists all through creation would feel awed and become worshipful of this presence.  I will tell you though that there is nothing about this presence that has ever once demanded that I go down on one knee.  I think this has to do with our own limited conception of what a deity is, and what a deity was for us thousands of years ago may have been more like observing a Lord or ruler of some kind. I can tell you that this being seems to observe and flow through all things lovingly more than in any egoistic way.  It wants us to be happy and to find our own freedom in expression and in fulfillment….and just as it has created so much, it is itself curious to see what WE will create.  And what WILL we create?

Within this Presence lies a central vibration that is pure love.  I can’t even begin to tell you how incredible this thing is.  I don’t even know why I am using all this time telling you about it when I could be focused on the bliss that it confers.  But here I am, explaining that there is something truly remarkable inside of you.  It is a piece of the divine and that slip of divine has the capacity to vibrate at the same vibration as the central force in all things.  This vibration is love.  This love, however, may be unlike anything you have thus far experienced.  It is not something that you feel FOR something, it is a force that IS everything.  It is kind of awesome that way.  Truly.  But in order to embody it, you need to become aware of it. Can I help you to recall this?  When the sages speak of “self realization” they aren’t talking about decades worth of work and yoga postures, they are talking about a simple act of recalling who we are deeper down. We are like amnesiacs who have been shipwrecked on this planet and we wake up one day to realize we are travellers from a distant land who are all artists of one kind or another.  As our memories unfold and sharpen, we realize we have all of these remarkable abilities.  Some amongst us say we are here to be punished.  These people, those are the ones who have not fully remembered, because were they to remember fully, they would become speechless and just stand gape-mouthed at the realization of just what we are.  How do I jog your memory?  All you have to do is to look inside very quietly and begin to FEEL your energy.  When you FEEL your energy, you feel it from one central place within the core of your awareness.  In this place, in this stillness, stop taking your own energy for granted.  Ask yourself what IS this energy that is you?  FEEL that energy and center on it with your attention. You do not need anything more than this except that.  The quieter you can become, the more still you can be, the better.  This is not easy, so by gently bringing your busy mind back into a center of focus each time with becoming quiet and centered on feeling your own core of energy, you can slowly begin to learn to develop a practice of developing a capacity to rest within this energy in a way that can lead to a revolution in memory.  Breathing has in the past been connected to this process since breathing inward also helps to move energy in your body.  If it helps, breathing in a deep and steady way, much like how you breathe just before you fall asleep, is the perfect way to breathe for recalling your soul self.  You can also bring great relaxation by pressing one nostril closed and breathing in and out four times each and then changing to the other nostril. You can do this as many times as you need in order to drift into a deeply relaxed state.  You can also press your hands together as in prayer and then focus on the place where the hands meet.  The reason why this method is so powerful is because the hands when brought together in prayer actually complete a circuit in the body that helps build and accumulate energy.  By placing your attention on the place where the hands meet, you are activating the quantum potential within the energy to vault yourself into a new form of awareness.  This form of awareness is one that moves you from object-based awareness to what I would call field-based awareness.  It is the basis for a method I call Divine Energetics which uses the power of the brain and body to accumulate the type of energy that can lead to awakening and to greater awareness.  It is actually as simple as learning how to shift from an “I” object-based form of awareness and reasoning to one that is not based in objects but fields, waves, of awareness.  It is in the wave or field (the forest instead of the trees) that the awakening experience awaits you.  Having said that, being ready by working through the more thorny issues of your life can be a big help to you because once awakening comes small things are greatly magnified.  It is my sense, though, that sometimes the only real way to work through our small things and big things is by having them magnified by the presence of awakening or kundalini.  It is what it does; it helps us to see even the most minute grain of sand in order that we can cast it aside from the great turning of the wheels within us so that it does not scratch or harm or hurt our very delicate inner workings.

Our energy can serve as a tuning fork.  Just as the central sun or light or presence serves as a tuning fork for us, we too also attune others whether we know it or not.  The more receptive or open we are to this attunement, the more likely it is to happen.

Long before I ever had my awakening but a few months into seeing auras, I was sitting with one of my room mates as we spoke.  I was talking about something, I forget what exactly, but I noticed that I was feeling what I know now to be my own core energy.  This energy is strong…..its not a flowing kind of energy….it certainly wasn’t at the time.  It is like I am most often; animated, intense and with a brilliant kind of flash to it.  That same year I had a memory from a past life where I was a native American man who had a vision that had Thunder Beings in it.  Like a bolt of lightening; that was what it was like. I had felt this emerge over  the years.  It was in some ways what I thought to be a very masculine kind of energy.  As it turned out that the Sky was most often polarized towards the masculine in native imagery and belief while the earth was considered the feminine polarity.  Certainly in the vision I was being shown an archetypal image that served to merge the sky with earth in a cleansing that I was told would happen when I was reborn as a new person.  The vision from that past life was a prophecy about the life I am leading now.  “You will bear a power to the earth that will be cleansing….”  How could I have known that kundalini would do this?  Certainly kundalini was a cleansing force, yes, and perhaps, then I was here to help in the cleansing of the earth….which is within us just as we are within it. By learning to cleanse ourselves, would be manage to cleanse the earth?  It turned out that there were all kinds of prophecies about this Day of Cleansing from the Navajo, Hopi, Lakota, Ojibwe, and more.  All agree that we are in the Day of Cleansing period and those who teach about it tend to do so in a way that is dynamic; we are not separate from the effects that are happening before us.  The junk on the face of the earth is the junk in our own minds. CLean the mind and heart and the world can itself also begin to heal.  When my vibration changes, it becomes easier for you to change.  It is possible to change the world this way, you see.  We just need enough people here to effect this change.  From all accounts, I’d say that it is happening.  But on this day, I was talking to my room mate and feeling this energy.  As I spoke to him, I explained what I saw in his aura.  I could feel myself feeling this vibration of energy very strong.  I would later think of it as my tuning fork effect.  As I spoke to him, he began to look at me funny.  I asked him what was up and he explained that he saw a light all around me.  To test to make sure my room mate wasn’t pulling my leg I asked him to do something that I knew meant nothing to him but that would help me to gauge if he was actually seeing auras. I asked him to take off his glasses.  Now to understand this, you need to realize that John wore these coke bottle glasses.  The poor soul had such poor eyesight that his eyes looked like big fish eyes staring back at you through those thick panes of plastic.  When John took off his glasses, he was blind.  But instead of going blurry, John’s face grew even more amazed.  He said “the light!  It is so bright!”  It was then that I knew that John was indeed “seeing” auras.

Over the years I would find that when I was feeling my own inner core energy and reading energy that people had a habit of beginning, right then and there, to see auras.  My intuitive sense has been that all that has ever really happened is that by feeling my own energy in the way that I do, the people who were receptive enough, were able to tune into the same frequency I was on and it opened the sense up within them as well.  This phenomenon has happened about five times and I often can feel when someone else around me is about ready to activate this sense in themselves.  I can sense a similar vibrational frequency.

It turns out that Reiki is a healing modality that does something similar.  At least this is the read I get from it.  Last week I had my first attunement and what I experienced was how practicioners could help conduct universal and soul energy through my system in a way that was beneficial for my own healing.  By shifting my vibration it helped to move old energy blocks in my body that had been there for a very long time.  By doing this I was better able to feel my “own” energy which is itself like being a fountain for a source of energy that is the universe.  The more I do this, the closer I get, I achieve a divine alignment and it is in this divine alignment that I feel peace and joy and bliss while working on what remains for me to heal in my own energy body.  That we manage to hold so hard onto these old hurts and blockages is testament to how our own individuality becomes accustomed to a less than marvelous way of being and feeling.

Its weird.  It really is.  And yet, we all do this.  All of us.  Slowly and sometimes quickly, we are moved to the center of some great wheel…..to an axial point in our awareness where so much just falls away.  It is like a cosmic seduction.  I feel my soul grow naked under the great vibratory force that is this divine love.  I find I just don’t care anymore…..and in not caring, I lose my fear over what I am afraid might lie in the center of my soul.  Some dark pit or some glitch or something less than perfect, less than lovable, less than beautiful.  And yet, this seductive force teased me out of my shadows, out of the old feeling of not being good enough or strong enough or bold or smart enough or handsome or any of the rest.  It floods me with such incredible love that I just melt.

I am returned to a baseline vibration…..to a primordial state…..and its not harps and angels.  Its fiery flowers bursting open with passion and stars exploding into new worlds in the night.  It is the grinding force of gravity hending space and the passionate love that bears a moon to its planet.  It is the force that brings blood to churn in the heart, the nutrients to flow from root to leaf, of a boundless frequency that pervades all and makes all as it changes from one thing to another and is all things all at once.  It is a dance around the maypole, it is a passionate kiss by the fire.  It is a love of great art and science and devotion to all things great and hopeful.  It is the incredible reach and trembling grasp of our kind as we seek to break the bonds of one cradle to recognize the bonds of a still larger one ahead of us.  All of this could be some remarkable miracle or a mundane blurp of accident and for those where it is all mere accident, there is a kind of pall of death that comes over the soul.

So what do you want?  Do you want to follow rules laid out ahead of you or are you willing to realize that its all in your to know the infinite realm that spreads out before all of us?  In touching this wonder of wonders, doesn’t it just seem such a waste that humans would spend time making war and enriching themselves when there is more than enough for everyone here and that we could be doing such incredible things instead of merely seeking advantage.  Isn’t it time for the Goddess within each of us, the part that sees the larger good for all, to awaken collectively so that we might all be softened by this part of us that we shoved under the rug so long ago?  Isn’t it time for love to reign in heaven, the kind of love where God must close the door so he might be with his Beloved Goddess?  And isn’t it time that we allowed ourselves to see our Gods and Goddesses as loving and affectionate instead of angry and vengeful?  Aren’t the Gods and Goddesses our own projections anyway?  And in so being, might we not ourselves be able to remake our world in a finer sort of vibration where we become not the lost children of an angry father-god but the children of a happy and loving family of father/mother?  Because, I have to point out, that  it is in this vibration that their bliss is known.  Isn’t the bliss of this experience equal to the touch of the higher forces reaching one into the other for completion…..and isn’t this the same thing that happens to us as we ourselves awaken, which is that we merge that which is lacking in us, most often our opposites, in order to know bliss and love and joy and all the rest?  Isn’t this what we seek the beloved for?  Isn’t this really  just the way to clothe and describe a great mystery where there is no father, there is no mother, but there is a wondrous reality that is entirely beyond words even though we do seek to put it all to words?  Touch the universal force and you shall know the product of their love, their union, their hearts as vast forces that dream worlds into being.  I know that this may all sound like utter madness to you, but in the realm of the spirit, things are not always anchored to objects the way they are in the physical and this experience is very much bringing the heaven to earth. It is.  It is the Kingdom.  Here. So if that sounds crazy, what can I say?

All of this may all sound grandiose to you.  It is.  I admit it.  But so is the force that turns at the core of all things.  In fact, it is just beyond all description.  We, so little, like ants really, we are just feeling the far edge of its wonder.  What will happen when we learn to bite fully into it and know it rich flavor and juiciness?  And when, really, are you going to stop your inner struggle and just let go of that river bank and trust that the river shall take you to a still greater sea?  There is a tuning fork inside of you and you need only find it.  Then let yourself feel it.  In feeling your energy, you can know the wonder that is the universe.  People seek this for lifetimes.  I ti s here now on the planet in a way it has not been in many many generations.  By saying yes to it in your heart, you will say yes to a great love that is what you are and that is the universe.

In The Garden…

This time of year brings with it a gradual descent into a new season; autumn.  Now for me, this has always been a sad time of year; everything is dying and going silent…asleep.  It was also when school started back up and for me, for many years of my younger life, I hated school and grew to associate the falling of leaves with having to go to that dreaded place called school.  But since being liberated from such places (even after getting advanced degrees—what was I thinking???), I have slowly warmed back to the season that is this time of year.  Finally.

As the flowers and fruits and veggies planted in spring die away, they leave their old bodies to be discarded into the compost heap, which is where they go.  But many also give up a great gift; seeds.  I hear a lot of complaining about Monstanto and the whole seed issue.  I say that the more we each value and save our own seeds, the less any Monsantos will be able to thrive.  I know that for Monsanto they are focused more on the commercial farmer, but this is something that I think is a cultural phenom; change it in one place and it tends to grow into other localities (like the heads on the farmers bodies!)  We will simply value the natural biological diversity of what Mother Nature has supplied us over millions of years of her own tinkering that anything so quickly whipped up in the labs of Monsanto would be considered the horrendous gamble with the planet that they really are.  So lesson learned?  Save your seeds!

Last year I bought six raspberry plants from my local nursery.  I got a variety known as Caroline.  I prepared the bed carefully and amply.  I added compost and made sure it was well tilled.  The plants have had an interesting first year.  They have not doubled, but quadrupled in size in number of plants from just last year.   I am thrilled!  However, I am also impatient….and counting my pennies, so instead of buying new root stock in the Spring, I will be doing something that no one seems to be talking much about; starting raspberry plants from SEED!

I don’t know anyone who has done this.  But I am going to do it.  I mean, things COME from seeds, right?  It makes sense that I could grow an incredible crop of raspberries.  If I manage to get 50% germination out of the seeds I have saved from my plants, it would mean that I would have enough plants to create a patch of raspberries that in two years would be producing enough raspberries that I would be able to can preserves for the winter.  There are VERY few things that I actually like canned.  Veggies I don’t care for being canned, but fruit I like.  Perhaps its the sugar content, right?  But think of it; hundreds of new raspberry plants, growing from little sprigs in what used to be the room where I did all my writing and that also gets all of the sun during the day.  It is like a greenhouse in there.  THAT will be where the new plants will go and it is also where I start all my new plants ahead of the planting season, usually in February.

Raspberries are great because they are so easy to cultivate.  It seems they are not picky about the soil at all and they like to spread.  I try to use only my compost that I make each year for my plants but I did start the bed with a dash of 10-10-10 for good measure.  I think based on how they have grown and spread, its been something that has paid dividends.

The process of growing raspberries from seed is tricky.  With a hard outer shell, the seed is designed, it would seem, to do best in the gut of a bird prior to being shat out.  It is the acidic treatment in the gut of the bird, it has been suggested, that helps speed the germination of the seed.  That might be an old wives tale, but it sure sounds like it could be right.  This is to say that such seeds take a while to germinate.  I am told they can take several months to do so.  During that time I must keep the beds moist but not TOO moist….otherwise the seeds will ROT.  Not a good thing, it seems, for such a tender little life. So be sure to use a starting medium which often is made up of sphagnum and some other potting soil ingredients to keep the seed properly wet but supported nutritionally for when it counts.

For those who are curious, raspberries are allowed to fall apart in a dish for a few days.  If you let them sit the juice will dry up and you will have a fairly dessicated seed remaining that can be washed some to strip it of the pithy fruit around it.  This seed is then placed in growing medium and kept damp for about three months in a dark room which is the time and conditions under which raspberry seeds are said to germinate.  Fingers crossed!  If this works, I will be up to my neck in raspberries and folks will have to come help me pick them.

The compost heap is now over grown with a fall planting of mustard greens, something that I fancy for a fall garden.  It is also one of the FEW things that can handle the winter weather.  They get covered so they will overwinter some!  As those tender shoots keep coming on during the warm then cold days that are ahead of us in the yo-yo that is Fall,   I will be planting hundreds of new little raspberries in small pots indoors and hoping for the best.  Thus far the two fig twigs are on their way to becoming honest to goodness fig tree bushes (our variety that grows best is a brown turkey), and I am dreaming of what other things I can add to the panoply.  The flower bed is now being razed, dead branches go everywhere as I fill up my wheelbarrow and head for the compost heap.  I have more seeds from those flowers than I think I have room for!  Anyone want some really great seeds for spring?

Fall is shaping up nicely.  Just in time to cut some firewood for the stove.  I might have not liked autumn in my youth, but I will forgive it that for the wood fires it brings into my life.  That alone is well worth the trip around the wheel once again.

Reiki – Followup

I was told that I might experience a kind of “healing crisis” after releasing such deep stuff as I did in my Reiki session this past Wednesday (and which I wrote about last post).

The material that I moved was some pretty old stuff that went back to my first year of life.  My father was diagnosed as having cancer soon after I was conceived.  I grew up not knowing my Father because he was gone when I was 16 months old.  I always felt like I was a giant sponge energetically and emotionally. I had no way to deal with all of these very hard emotions.  I grew up angry and distant from my mother who I felt had abandoned me emotionally.  In a sense she did, yes, but it was because she herself was suffering knowing my father was dying.  And he did die.  And she was worried what she would do with four children.  It was 1967 and a woman, unless she was independently wealthy or owned her own business, was most often dependent on a man to provide.  That was the soup I grew up in in the womb and that I came into on the day of my birth.  My mother tells of how she and my father shared smiles and tears on the day of my birth.  My great grandmother upon seeing me said “I wonder if the poor fellow knows what he is in for…..”

Now I am not pulling out the violins.  In fact, we all have our own past hurts that grab hold of us.  We all do.  By telling you this, though, I am actually saying that if I can move such stubborn dug in material, so can you.  I have been through an awakening of kundalini, life force which is so abundant that its very force helps to remove these blocks.  But even kundalini has not move this one big bundle of blocks from those early years and which have settled into my root, sacral and partly in my solar plexus region.  Here are the more emotionaly guided centers of energy. This is where our sense of survival spring, our sexuality, our inner beauty and our will. All of this is important for healthy self image and for attracting all the right things into ones own life. When life force increases in your life and you remove blocks, what you put into this strong life force comes out as a very fast turn-around cycle for manifestation.  What poeple are talking about as the 11:11 signs and “syncs” are actually a poorly understood phenomenon that will show you, when you understand it, how you and the universe are linked in a co-creative relationship!  This is part of what my new book Waking The Infinite is about.  I am looking forward to getting this book finished and on the market!

The reiki session resulted in my being able to realize what it was I had shoved down so long ago.  It put me into direct contact with those old feelings and it helped me to understand a little better the mystery of that time which has been shrouded in a fog behind memory.  One thing I can tell you is that reiki has had similar effects as acupuncture and some body work.  I have also experienced the same effects with Qi Gung (also spelled Gong).  All of this is part of a continuum of energy work with slightly different means to the same end.  Whatever works, I say. Cranial-Sacral therapy is also another very profound method for reaching deep states of release and surrender and thus healing.  By letting go of a lot of material you can come away feeling a little unsteady.  I felt as though something had been stirred up that was kind of hard.  For me I realized that since I had never grieved the loss of my father, this feeling was shoved down and was reexperienced in a kind of distorted fashion in the way we might walk around an angry bull. Be know the bull is angry but we don’t do anything to help the bull release its anger.  We just keep walking around it and that bull just stays mad as hell.  For years.  Maybe he dies angry.  So letting this stuff goes is like walking right up to that bull and not being afraid of it only to find that the bull suddenly changes.  He melts.  Then, instead of a big bad creature we all stay away from, he became a gentle giant who lounges in the shade of trees and snorts from time to time, but only because he pulled in too much pollen from the flowers he was smelling.  Yes, this healing process is much like this. It is a revelation.

In the wake of this partial clearing my thoughts have cleared much more.  A whole slew of things I am seeing in a much clearer light than I had before.  Issues related to how the pain in my root had served to set up a vibration that attracted other people with similar problems. I have been able to see more clearly with compassion how people have sought to hurt me in the past.  I just see it differently.  the universal field energy is moving through me without the same lenses that I had in place.  People I was once attracted to I see as they are…..as people who are themselves not complete in their process, quite gnarly, and thus given to biting and other chaotic behavior. I know that as I dissolve this last big block remaining, it should have a corresponding effect on how I see and feel about a range of things that have caused me suffering.

It makes healing job one.

Being able to bring love and compassion into the moment is so important.  Learning the balance between selfless love and sound boundaries with people who are themselves not yet there is so important.  I remember toddling on my feet after getting up from the table from Reiki and someone behind me asked if I was interested in learning to do reiki and I explained that I always felt like I would be really good at it but I wanted to be as clear as I could be.  I smiled and looked over at the lady on my left and I said, “And that is why I am here.”

I hope to return next week and every week thereafter until this block is completely clear.  And then?  Its curious because a voice inside of me said “You will soon be clear…..what awaits you then I wonder???”  And I realized, whoah, I am nearing this point…..releasing all this stuff which is karmic….maybe its time I begin to shift gears into healing work.  Well who knows, right?  Life is a mystery.

REiKi

For years I have been aware of the energy therapy called Reiki that was developed by a Japanese man who lived up until 1929 who had an awakening and developed this method for helping to move energy blocks.  I learned about it as a therapy while speaking to a friend and psychotherapist who was beloved by many in our community as a wise and intuitive healer.  We were sitting in his yard and I was explaining that I felt like there was a way that one could heal a person through their energy field without talking to them, or even touching them, all done at a distance.  He smiled and said that I might be on to something. It was there that I learned about this therapy called Reiki.  Being the nonconformist and lone wolf, I never did any more than read about the basics of the discipline.  Having been aware of energy for years since beginning to see auras when I was 18, the ideas behind Reiki all sounded on the mark to me.  But I was not a joiner.  It was like some sense I had even back then that by not aligning to other methods that I would be more free to create my own or to see something perhaps more clearly….what, I was not sure.  Twenty years and an awakening later, this impulse has begun to make more sense to me in terms of what it is I am trying to do with understanding awakenings.

It has been seven years since my awakening began and in that time I have had clearings of old latent material from a host of different levels within the light body, what is also called the pranamayakosha.  This light body has sheathes or levels much like an onion.  The literature states that there are five layers in the pranamayakosha, but intuition tells me there are seven within the range of our awareness in the physical.  In all truth, I suspect more and more that the real structure is that of a cone, a continuous broadening of the energy body into ever larger dimensions of awareness.  This is where we begin to experience the higher self.  Here resides bliss which we can begin to learn to anchor in our bodies, thus marrying heaven to earth, which I know to be a big goal in my own life.  If it helps to think of this all as layers, then use it, but just don’t limit your thinking…..there is more to all of this and it is waiting for you and me once we are ready to see touch and taste it. The result of this clearing is that I have removed a great deal of material.  It has been quite the trip!  And if anything has been a certainty is that the movement of life force or kundalini has not always been orderly. It has gone where it could do the most work, it seems.  So the idea that it goes from root to crown is a nice idea, but for me, the material in my root has been the hardest most stubborn stuff to deal with and so it has remained throughout this journey.  I have become increasingly aware of just how important is has been to clear this area, but it has been an example of a big glitch in my karmic makeup.

I have observed that most people seem to have a small cluster of issues that form a hard center or core of challenges that often tend to repeat from one lifetime to another.  Being able to heal these patterns is a huge thing since by dissolving it in one life it can loosen the threads in all others.  In truth, the idea of time works only as it is being lived…..but in the larger perspective, alltime becomes more like a landscape where many more things become possible. An event, then, in the past effects the future just as much as a future event sends out energetic ripples deep into the past.  In a recent journey into my own life as a teen, I was able to slip into my dreamtime way back then and insert a brief but brilliant moment of wisdom to my younger self.  The effect the following day was nothing short of revolutionary.  Whats so  curios was that I can remember having a dream where a weird almost manic future self showed up in a dream I had, looked me deep in the eyes and told me one simple thing.  It wasn’t about how to win the lottery or anything like that.  It was the one thing that would make the single biggest impact; love.  Love as deeply as you can.  She is going to come around the corner in fifteen minutes and if you get on that bus, you will miss her.  Just wait.  Wait and you will see her.  Love is the way. The following day there was a subtle yet noticable difference.  In the same way that I have known that the intelligence of kundalini is itself a future self more refined looping back through all time into its version of the past, it is helping me to change the pattern that might have otherwise been my life the way it was going before awakening visited me seven years ago.  The future self is thus changed.  I am changed.  Doing this travel is easy to do actually because it involves no mass.  No body. Just the light body. Try it.  You might be surprised just how easy it is.  Increasingly as people are becoming aware of this as a possibility this sort of travel, when used for healing and growth, reaps huge rewards.  The future self, like a more developed you, perhaps even like a cosmic parent, can visit you right here and now.

So this root has had be hung up. This root has been about the death of a father, the loss of a mother, a small baby who was not loved enough, who did not feel safe, who shut down…..and was thus also part of a pattern of countless lives lived where children were left without parents, adopted, left to live as urchins on the streets in centuries past.  This glitch in my makeup wore deep groooves into my being. Coming into this life, I carried it as a big skip on my karmic recording.  It kept going round and round, the record playing the same full revolution, never getting past that one spot. So it has been with awareness that I have sought to lessen its effects energetically as much as I can.  It has been stubborn.  Over the last few months, the removal of other material has highlighted the root more and more.  I have become more aware of it in a singular sort of way.  I have felt a near-constant sense of nausea, a feeling of thickness energetically there. And so it was that when I heard that there was a group who did Reiki attunements in my area that I thought it would be a good idea to get to know these folks.

I went last night.  The air was brisk and as I entered, there were perhaps seven people working on two people in the room.  I chatted with one of the therapists as they completed a therapy session with a student.  In an interesting turn of events, I was explaining that I had had a friend and healer who helped to move a block in my sacral with the waive of her hand. It was so effortless it changed how I thought about this “work” that we do in liberating ourselves from these kinds of things.  What was so unusual was that during that visit, the person who had just hopped up from the table had been at the local farmer’s market in my area and they chatted while we browsed the booths.  So here he was, again, standing up just as I told how my friend had done this clearing for me when we had met this young man who was…..just getting off the therapists table!  We all had a big smile and I got on the table.

At first, I could feel the energy, yes, but nothing happened.  One of the therapists left mid way through as he had to leave to go to work.  After he left, the therapists changed orientation.  We spoke as they began to place their hands at different places on my body.  I explained what it was that was giving me trouble, that for all the clearing I had done my root was giving me a real challenge.  Everyone was gentle, kind, and supportive.  As I relaxed more and more I found that my awareness opened up and I dropped into what I call the zone.  Within minutes I felt a shimmering of high vibrational energy moving through me.  I could feel the therapist with her energy moving up through my feet into my legs, serving as a kind of tuning fork for my own energy.  Someone at my head cradled me. After some minutes the therapists changed position and someone new came over to my head.  This was where I felt like some part of my awareness went waaaay out.  Gosh, what WAS that?  I felt like he was almost bilocated to some other place…..a higher dimension.  I kept hearing the number “7” being said over and over.  I realized that this was my crown chakra.  “Oh right!  Crown!…..”  there was a presence in the room and I was suddenly standing with him over near where I first came in.  I was asking him something but he smiled and said, “you wont remember…..just keep with the attunement and all will be well…..”

A therapist asked if my neck hurt and I said that it didn’t.  In that moment, though, I felt a sudden thickness in my shoulders rising up out of my heart and I replied that while I didn’t feel physical pain, I did feel like a block was trying to move all of a sudden.  I felt a familiar kind of sense as though I was about to pass out, except I never did. This feeling always seems to accompany strong releases of energy for me.  I also can get a feeling of nasusea as well.  I was getting both at this point.  It was here that I mentioned how I felt the pain in my energy body from the root upwards into the sacral.  A therapist was already there describing it, which was when the energy began to move.  I had said earlier that I thought that maybe the energy would move quietly through Reiki, but I was beginning to feel a swelling of emotion deep down inside of me.

I felt as though I had been hurdled all the way back to an early time in life.  This was hard.  It was a hard, sad, and even scary time.  My father was dying and my mother was in turmoil.  I was very young, an infant.  I felt a swirl of emotion.  I felt sadness over not being loved.  I also felt grief.  I was aware of my father dying, of his absence and how important his presence was in my life during that brief time. It was as though I never got to grieve his death.  This was a light bulb moment for me.   I had always felt a kind of sadness related to him, whcih I of course associated with his dying so young.  But when I touched it, the feeling was incredibly specific.  You see, I had always thought if I ever touched these feelings they would just be vague senses of loss or sadness.  Not so.  Everything felt keyed into very specific things that were immediately identifiable in my life.  It was as though emotional energy had the capacity to interface with very specific memories or perhaps that memory is also buried within feeling (which I think is maybe not what we might think at first blush when considering these things).  The discovery was that even as an infant, I had never gotten to grieve his death properly.  All of that grief got bottled up inside me. This was actually very clear.  I was very sad and had not grieved his death properly.  At age 14 months, I was not taken to his funeral. Deeper still were all these layers…..I wasn’t good enough to be loved….that was why I had slipped into this situation…..I feared I was not lovable.  These waves of emotion came one after another as I felt as though I had been pressed into the first year of my life, back into a space where I felt very small physically but very big energetically.  Everything felt out of proportion somehow.

The therapists could not have been more kind and supportive.  There was gentle and loving laughter as we chatted between my fits of grief and sadness.  It felt like layers were being shed.  I was aware of an edge of being uncomfortable with really letting go fully. There were other people there on another table.  One therapist said for me not to feel funny just letting it all out.  He let me know it was not unusual to really howl if I had to.  After a few more minutes it felt like I had cleared a good piece of it.  I felt some relief and THAT was a real relief.  As I lay there I could feel how everyone was wanting to go home.  It was a very quick and simple end to the session.  I got up and found that I could not write my name or my email address for a few moments.  This was a bit unexpected, but I really felt like I had gone way out. I suddenly had a flurry of impressions about the people who had worked on me.  One man I saw scrambling around on rocks near water.  He said he loved to be outdoors.  The man who had been there earlier I said I saw as a cook in another life, one in which he valued quality, was kind of crazy about quality as a path toward nurturing people. They smiled and explained that he was having to go to his job that he hated, which was at a local restaurant where the quality of the food was poor.  He was hoping to get a job at a place that valued quality more.  I agreed that he really needed that and actually thrived on it.

For the next hour I felt similar to how I had felt after I had had  acupuncture  a year previously.  I was aware of feeling a whole new layer of feelings that had been stuck in the root somehow. I felt…..different……I felt a level of compassion that was different than before.  It is hard to explain but I saw some things in my life differently.  I realized I had been seeing them through a lens of the old latent hurt. I also was able to see how the hurt as it was composed had attracted certain people in my life and how it too had blinded them in a like fashion.  I saw more clearly how important it is to accept our own stuff and not seek to put it on to other people, something that I saw how others had done to me before and that I had done to others also.  I saw how I had only been hurting myself, but that I had also hurt others by allowing this distortion to persist within me.  This distortion disrupted my ability to align to my higher self in this clearer way.  As long as that was in the way, I could not know the subtlety of awareness and perception that existed beyond the realm of those old suite of clothes.

My sense is that while I had an intense session, clearings using Reiki will have different effects for people at different stages of their process.  Like an onion, you may find that you start in one place and progress ever deeper until you reach the harder places where the self does not want to let go out of fear or shame.  This process, though, is slowly revealing the beauty that we are within. And me, I am going back next week for some follow-up work.

The Physiology of Kundalini

That is the title of a book written about coping with kundalini.  Today, however, I was in the studio working with my students on sculpture projects and while I was doing so there was a discussion about creativity and the brain.  This is one of my favorite topics and it has been given new life with my own awakening which has helped to highlight a good many things in regards to what happens with the body and brain in the midst of such an experience.  The topic made a turn for slightly subtle realms when one of the students wondered aloud if the experience of consciousness was beyond the body or if it was just the body.  This person was thinking or feeling it was beyond body.

We were talking about this whole connection and I said that what is really remarkable is the Left/Right brain relationship and that when we can let the left brain serve the right brain (effectively a linear processor serving a parallel processor) then we can begin to see just how amazing the brain is in creating a hologram in 3-D physical chemistry of the domain of the soul, of consciousness beyond the body.  I said consider what happens when awareness is not there at the body for an experience that is in consciousness…..it is as though it does not exist….and people will thus pooh-pooh an idea or experience they themselves have not had because they can’t feel it or “get” it at all.  And yet, the body HAS to have a way to record or measure the nonphysical experience which is in the ether, of the experience or else it is as good as not known or experienced.  So for the brain to be able to contemplate the infinite is pretty amazing.  You begin to realize the masterwork involved in the chemistry necessary to make up what we feel inside our skins.

Within the Light Body or what the Hindus call the Pranamayakosha, there are these nonphysical layers and within these layers there are different vibrations of energy that move through them.  This light body is electromagnetic and is fed by iron rich blood pumping through the body to create a weak but very real electrical and electromagnetic field.  When I read an aura it is courtesy of this field which displays the information as a stream of light and color around the body….again…in layers.  It is like having a slew of bodies one inside the other.  This body will record everything that has ever happened to you in the same way that the brain does.  Anything that you have had a hard time allowing to flow through you and has gotten “caught” emotionally will lodge and create a block.  Over time these blocks can be many.  Releasing these blocks leads to liberation and freedom from the emotions that served to create them in the first place.  Instead of denying emotion, they are instead felt fully and can be released through a range of methods which can be as simple as movement (Qi Gung worked for me), shaking (learned by an animal behaviorist by watching how animals shed trauma), reexperiencing the emotion, body massage or deep tissue manipulation, as well as Reiki and Reiki-like methods for moving energy.  But however the methods, the effects are permanent and leave the self increasingly free from the bonds of certain stuck emotions.  As these things are often shed chakra by chakra, they also go layer by layer….so think of the light body as a house with seven levels and seven rooms (chakras) within each level.  Or an onion with seven layers.  By doing this clearing, you also optimize the brain and body connection as well.  While kundalini brings wild swings as a result of latent karmic energy in the chakras or light body, these swings are less and less as you move through the process of casting off the dross.

My experience as a result of having to deal with the dark night of the soul, which for me was the revving up of kundalini to extremely high levels along with the triggering of some sort of adrenal response in my body, resulted in a painful six month ordeal where my adrenals were stuck in the on position.  This experience forced me to learn how to deal with fear in a while new way. It was the most arduous experience I have to date experienced.  It was also one of the most illuminating, too. I had to work to get my chemistry balanced the right way.  Along the way I learned how the body is a mirror of our feelings and just how much of a choice every single emotion is.  It underscored just how important it was that we choose healthy perspectives in living.  If we feel like a victim, this will be very disempowering and the body will follow suite PERFECTLY.  Being able to gain some measure of control over the body and what it does is huge for helping illustrate the clear connection between mind/brain and body chemistry.  I can make my body chemistry change ON A DIME now.  As a result, it pays for me to remain in a state of mind that is most conducive to bliss and a good flow of positive energy.  Instead of negatives reinforcing, its positives.

This is where developing a way of dealing with positive energy in an ongoing fashion is very helpful.  Perhaps you take something off the shelf….like yoga or a form of meditation.  For me, kundalini showed me the path WAS meditation.  Most of what I do in my day-to-day is like living a prayer.  This prayer is about the highest and best.  It is exciting because there were times when I could not imagine living like this.  There was, I think, just too much chaotic energy.  But all of this is a process and I can have my days.  the intense adrenal burn of kundalini three and a half years ago was very hard on my body.  Some suggested adrenal burn-out.  Time has shown that I still have reasonable adrenal function despite what I went through.

There is a very real mind/body connection with us as humans. This is no less obvious than in awakening.  How amazingly well the body will respond to our thoughts is a wonderful teacher for you if you can observe.  If you feel bad you will learn that its you who is doing it.  It’s not you being at the mercy of your body (unless you have a longstanding physiological problem that prohibits you from creating some portion of the necessary chemistry for some reason). This is, to my mind, the beginning at least, of learning how to be the master instead of the slave, the victor, not the victim.

Kombucha!

My first batch of kombucha sitting on the window sill

About two years ago I was introduced to a drink called kombucha. I had heard of it before but had no idea what it was.  An herbal concoction maybe?  Something from Pakistan?  Okay, okay, maybe not Pakistan!  Actually, it is from China.  Buying kombucha is not cheap.  The drink usually goes for about four dollars per serving.  Making it, however, is about as inexpensive as making your own tea. You could call it a tea with benefits.

Kombucha is most often a tea-based drink that has been allowed to ferment.  This fermentation creates a small amount of alcohol but is credited with creating a probiotic mix that some people have claimed has helped them with digestion problems.  Some people credit kombucha with various health benefits.  Kombucha emerged from China and has had a long track record.  Currently there are no testing or research done by western researchers that look into the benefits of kombucha. There are people online who do credit kombucha with a broad range of health benefits and when researching this topic for writing this article what I found as one of the biggest  benefits was  related to gastrointestinal health.

One individual mentioned how his wife had what appeared to be an undiagnosed case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  Another individual credited kombucha, along with other fermented products like miso, kimchi, etc., with her gastrointestinal problems. Some simply say that something that has been used for as long as kombucha can’t be bad and probably has some very good health benefits, otherwise, we would have done away with it by now.  This is very much the situation with things like cheese and yoghurt, all of which involve a discovery of milk products which have gone bad as the basis for a food product.  Besides the health benefits they believe kombucha has, many drink it for the taste.  Let’s just say that the taste can be a bit sour, like vinegar.  I have to admit to an odd affinity with kombucha.

Making kombucha is easy.  The main ingredients are tea and other fruit add-mixtures such a citrus or ginger.  Sometimes a fruit juice is added.  Truth be told, kombucha does not work well using things like honey or molasses.  To get kombucha to begin consuming the energy in your brew you need to supply it with sugar.  The more ordinary the sugar, the better!  Along with tea and fruit and sugar is the essential ingredient which is called the SCOBY.  The SCOBY stands for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast.  What this means, most often, is that you wind up with a combination or organisms that are all cooperative (or symbiotic).  You most often find a welter of good benefits from one organism that has a symbiotic relationship with other organisms so that all the organisms within a symbiotic relationship will provide benefits often.  The SCOBY, then, is a living organism and in order to find one you need to know someone who can provide you with a tissue culture.  Some people have had success using the kombucha from health food stores that still has some of the “mother” on the bottom of the bottle to use as a culture.   I have used a living culture for my own kombucha.

You can see the SCOBY floating below

My first batch of kombucha was over two months ago and I was excited.  I made the tea, had a clean container, put everything together in just the right way and placed my kombucha mix in my studio where I have lots of hot equipment running all the time and this helped jump start the digestion process of my kombucha.  Within a matter of several days my kombucha developed a tan leathery skin that grew in size over the weeks.  By the second week, however, I noticed that I had two small white spots on my SCOBY.  I surmised that this was mold and that this as NOT a good thing.  Doing the only thing I thought I could do, I tried to excise the mold from the SCOBY.  Now, I know that mold is microscopic and if you have one spot, you probably have thousands of others waiting to spawn….but I tried this anyway.  The SCOBY promptly dipped below the surface of the kombucha and drifted down into the brew.

A week later a while new skin developed on the kombucha but was quickly overtaken by a white mat of mold.  Being new to this, I looked this up to see if this was good or bad mold. Some of the pros have said that certain molds are okay.  I certainly seemed to have the “right” kind of mold on mine.  The only thing was that there were stories out there about people getting really sick from drinking kombucha that was not brewed right and had all the wrong microorganisms alive in it. Of course, this is enough to make any unseasoned kombucha brewer a little uncertain so I chose to record the look of my kombucha and then start over with a new batch.

The mat of mold up close

What I have learned from all of this is that I need to make sure that I keep everything used that comes into contact with my kombucha sterile, and this includes the cheesecloth that I use to cover the brew so it can breathe.  The new batch I am making today will be even more scrupulously clean in its surrounding (surfaces around where the kombucha are brewed and stored for example). I am looking forward to this new batch and will keep you updated!

UPDATE 10/19:

The new batch was prepared after having cleaned everything prior to inoculation, which is when the brew has cooled sufficiently to not kill off the introduction of the mushroom and bacteria into the mix.  Its important to be able to keep the kombucha warm enough so that the organisms begin working right away.  This means having a temperature of about 80 degrees, with a range between 75° F. and 85° F. as optimal. Once you hit 100° and above, the brew is slowly killed.  In my case, I was intersted in seeing if I could run a continuous brew where I would tap some of the kombucha for use and then I would add more tea and sugar, leaving it alone to brew the necessary number of days.  My thinking was that I could get a container that has a drain cock on the bottom of the container so I could draw off whatever amount I needed while keeping a steady fermentation going.  No sooner had I considered this, I came across an article explaining how beneficial continuous fermentation is over single run batches.  This has seemed the way to approach it for now and so this is how I am now set up.  The advantage I have read is that this keeps the development of mold down since once a good mix of spore and other flora are developed, that this naturally keeps any unwanted intruders at bay. Again, we will see how that goes!

 

RIght now the brew is being kept warm in a warm spot in the house and I am eager to note any change in the brew mix…

Help!

All through my life I have made a careful observation that as my own capacity to hold onto larger and larger amounts of energy, my own awareness would clarify and seem rejuvenated.  I knew the secret lay in how to move more energy through us, this vital force.  I didn’t know it then, but I was effectively seeking awakening. The thing about awakening, though, is that it can be a bit like what happens when you let go of the brakes on a car that you have been keeping them on for so long.  There is this lurch forward of this force, this vital force in you that wants to be FREE!  And so you get these rather scary or upsetting awakening experiences sometimes that can make a person feel like they are suddenly out of control.

All of this is about an emergence of our own inner energetic potential.  This potential makes it more possible for us to vault ourselves into other parts of who and what we are, in effect, to broaden our awareness through energy.  But what happens when an emergence of energy becomes a flood of energy, which feels less like emergence and more like emergency?

The thing to realize in awakening is that when things turn bad, it really is all about you.  You have complete control over the quality of your awakening experience, and you will know how easy it can become when you learn to do one thing; surrender.  Then let go.  Not just conditionally or part way; let go.  Then let go more.  I promise that relief lies in letting go.  Ego represents a big hurdle for this energy, so it must step out of the way.  I am not a neurologist but what I observe is that the same part of brain function that is involved in left brained and rational thought is very closely aligned with ego.  It may be that significant parts of how we identify between objects and things in our world is processed through the left brain portions of our left hemisphere.  But by identifying overtly with object-based reality, we also lose sight of the deeper aspect of reality, which does not lies at its surface.  Ergo; high ego function, low ability to really grasp the breadth of the experience and process the energy properly whjch always leads to issues related to tension, anxiety, and fear (and this is the substance of spiritual emergencies or kundalini syndrome and other terms like that).  Once you are able to let go of the need to identify so strictly in an object based way (which also includes “I” and “me” and other such objects of a highly specific and individual nature).  In some cases the energy can and does barge right over ego and the rest of the self.  This can throw people into state of anxiety and fear.  Again, all of this is as you make it.

The most important thing is to be honest with yourself and own your experience.  When you feel fear, realize it is YOUR fear and you are here to conquer it so that you can live life without fear.  A little energy in you is creating fear; what do you think the rest of life is going to do to you?  Master the disaster.  The only disaster is the one you have created in your own mind.  Fear is the greatest enemy.  Conquer it.  I think learning how to cope with this experience is unlike any other means of coping.  I do think that there really isn’t anything on the planet that prepares us for this type of experience when it comes.  However, I think that an ability to meditate might be good, although the weird thing was that I found the way my brain states changed, I felt like I was in a near-constant state of meditation all the time….so I am not so sure saying mediation is the answer.  Letting go is the answer, and sometimes, doing this, it can feel like death.  However, learning how to die in this way is the way through I think.  It leads to conquering death, which, paradoxically, is something spoken about in the old esoteric circles having to do with alchemy and a other mystical things.  Its not that we don’t die, it is that we reach a place where fear does not rule us like it once did.  We can also begin glimpsing over and over until we get the memo that this is not all that there is.  This something more, its right here with us like an invisible friend reminding us until we get it and the fear washes slowly or suddenly away.

So having said all that, I will be good and include a resource for you that might be of some help.  Go to SEN and I hope it provides you with food for thought.

This is the first important step in awakening which can determine whether you live in fear or you learn to be fearless.  When you have conquered your backlog of fear, awakening will turn from dark to brilliant.  Life is as you see it!  If you bring love and compassion, you will feel this.  Bring fear, and that is what you have.  Open your hand, say yes to life, don’t close your hand or your heart to life.  Here’s hoping for wonderful experiences for you in your life!

Good luck on your path, where ever it takes you!